Plan B Forum

* חֲנוּכָּה...obvsly.

(Now light some candles and eat some latkes!)

'tis a real problem. Visual symbols for indicating a sound from the human voice. Symbols only work when there is mutual understanding of the symbol system. The source/sound comes from humans who are speaking a language that is not into-european, with sounds that are not included as the usual pattern of Spoken American English, and use a writing system that is very different from the Roman alphabet. Similar to the current confusion 'how do you spell the capital city of China--with a B or a P? The locals speak the name with a sound that is sort of a P and sort of a B and is not a good fit for either letter as it is used for English words. I remember wandering around the main streets of Heidelberg Germany in December of 1960 and coming across a poster advertising a holiday ballet performance. The name of the ballet sure looked to me (I read conversational German pretty good, but slowly) like 'The Nutcracker" but who the heck was this composer? It made no sense to me at all. German spelling is very phonetic, compared to English so I 'sounded it out' Oh, of course--it was the familiar Russian composer but his very Russian name rendered into German phonetic spelling, that looked very different to me from my familiar Tchaikovsky.

I like the cute reference to this language problem in the song above mentioning the Hispanic Juan spelled the holiday n in yet another way

snailgate

Yah, not to worry, we don't know how to spell it in Hebrew either. Is it חֲנוּכָּה or חֲנֻכָּה? You'll see both. (I prefer spelling it with the vav in the middle to represent the "oo" sound, because without it and also without the usually-omitted diacritical marks (חנכה) it more logically sounds as "chanakah" or even "chanchah."

But I'll just wish you all a happy holiday (!חג שמח), and leave you with this:

I don't.

I think that Mondrian is upside down. Happens all the time

That O'Keeffe is definitely bottom-side-up.

I actually have a Keith Haring-style hanukkiah ("menorah"), very much like that picture. The "Duchamp" is hilarious, gonna get me one like that to add to the collection (I've got more than a dozen already).